The Color Of Invisible Ink

The Milky Way over the Badlands. Nearly all of my night sky photos are done in two pieces. The sky was exposed using a tracking mount to render the stars as sharp dots rather than streaks. The foreground was exposed with the tracking mount turned off and I light painted the hills using an LED flashlight. The two pieces are then combined in Photoshop.
I’m convinced that the fundamental purpose of photography is to allow us to capture a view that couldn’t be seen otherwise. There are lots of reasons for taking a picture; we might want to record a scene or an image of a friend to look at later or perhaps to share with someone else. We might want to use photographic technologies to reveal a scene in a way that can’t be seen with our eyes. Or we might want to create an image that expresses our own unique way of seeing the world. The first two reasons are pretty obvious. We take lots of snapshots of friends and family just as a way of remembering the event. It's something we can put into a s...